Somewhere out there!

Politics for Sale in the Land of the Free:

In Senate testimony, and then in numerous presentations, Dr. Michaels claimed that the actual pace of global warming was falling far short of Dr. Hansen’s predictions. As evidence, he presented a chart supposedly taken from a 1988 paper written by Dr. Hansen and others, which showed a curve of rising temperatures considerably steeper than the trend that has actually taken place.

In fact, the chart Dr. Michaels showed was a fraud — that is, it wasn’t what Dr. Hansen actually predicted. The original paper showed a range of possibilities, and the actual rise in temperature has fallen squarely in the middle of that range. So how did Dr. Michaels make it seem as if Dr. Hansen’s prediction was wildly off? Why, he erased all the lower curves, leaving only the curve that the original paper described as being “on the high side of reality.”

Technorati Tags: politics, climate, freedom

Clever analysis of IT spending between Google and Yahoo by StorageMojo » Killing With Kindness: Death By Big Iron

The Bottom Line
Google’s IT spend nets them at least a third more in revenue than Yahoo’s, and probably 50-60% more. I didn’t look at operating expense, but Google employs about 4,000 fewer people, too. So the autonomic GFS is probably saving money on the OpEx side as well.

Technorati Tags: google, yahoo, analysis

I think this comment from Stiglitz: What the IMF Must Do to Reestablish Legitimacy clearly states the complication of international trade. 

This poses a dilemma for Chinese policy makers. Subsidising their own farmers would divert money from education, health, and development projects. Or China can try to maintain an exchange rate that is slightly lower than it would be otherwise. If the IMF is to be even-handed, should it criticise American farm policies or China’s exchange-rate policies?

As a side note, three books on economics I can recommend to any are: Naked Economics, Freakonomics and one I finished this weekend The Undercover Economist. The last one being a very good

Technorati Tags: china, economics, international, books, trade, usa

Some commentary on the Petrodollars.

Between 1973 and 1981, Opec spent just 52 per cent of its oil revenues on imports. Today, with larger populations and undeveloped infrastructure, Opec member countries are attempting to spend productively at home rather than save abroad.

What of the remaining $125bn? An amazingly small proportion has gone into US Treasuries – just $10bn, according to official figures. However, other data suggest something in the order of another $25bn has been spent on US equities, corporate bonds and government agency debt.

Via the New Economist:

As a result of weaker job creation than usual and sluggish real wage growth, American incomes have increased much more slowly than in previous recoveries. According to Morgan Stanley, over the past four years total private-sector labour compensation has risen by only 12% in real terms, compared with an average gain of 20% over the comparable period of the previous five expansions. Without strong gains in incomes, the growth in consumer spending has to a large extent been based on increases in house prices and credit.

When house-price rises flatten off, and therefore the room for further equity withdrawal dries up, consumer spending will stumble. Given that consumer spending and residential construction have accounted for 90% of GDP growth in recent years, it is hard to see how this can occur without a sharp slowdown in the economy.

The big question is whether the rest of the world will slow too. The good news is that growth is becoming more broadly based, as demand in the euro area and Japan has been picking up, and fears about an imminent hard landing in China have faded. America kept the world going during troubled times. But now it is time for others to take the lead.

Nicholas Lardy talks about the link between Yuan and China’s Trade Surplus in Parsing China’s Trade Surplus. Included are interesting statistics on imports vs export and foreign company trade figures in China.

What’s driving China’s trade surplus?
The big driver isn’t on the export side but on the import side. Export growth fell a bit, but import growth was barely half what it was in 2004, so there has been this ballooning of the trade surplus.

Based on the data available so far, it looks like the biggest decline in imports is in machinery and equipment. Parts and components that go into export processing are still growing at 25% to 30% annually. But machinery and equipment is running at about a third the rate of 2004 — that’s to say at 10% rather than the 30%-plus growth seen in 2004. So what we’re seeing in 2005 was some slowing in the pace of domestic investment.

And a lot of those goods are produced by Western multinationals exporting from China, right?
About 55% of all exports are from foreign-owned companies or joint ventures. That share has been growing about 1 or 2 percentage points annually in recent years but may be stabilizing now. It looks like foreign capital coming into China in 2005 is going to be down slightly — the first time in many years that it will have fallen. That may mean the share of foreign-produced goods won’t grow as fast as it has in the past.

But even if you take out all the foreign-owned exporters, Chinese domestic companies have been growing their exports. Their share has been declining, but many companies are exporting more and more. And a lot of people don’t recognize that about half of all the goods produced by foreign companies in China are sold in China. The auto sector is the best example — 95% of the autos sold there are made by foreign companies or JVs.

How much would a further revaluation of the Yuan affect the situation?
I’ve been in the camp that has said the Chinese currency is undervalued and that the adjustment last July was far too modest. But even if China were to revalue its currency significantly, it would continue to have a trade surplus with the U.S. The fact is, most of the goods that are produced in China used to be made somewhere else. If you look at the overall U.S. trade deficit, Asia’s share has been declining.

The Printable CEO a clever self-management method.

We’ve been using the latest OO2 beta (97, now 104) in the office. For some reason my brother’s installation was producing corrupted files that couldn’t be reopened. So I tried the simple approach to trying to fix it. Unzip, ran content.xml though firefox and found this error: “XML Parsing Error: duplicate attribute. Location: file:///home/nic/tmp/pp/content.xml Line Number 2, Column 10155:”.

A quick with hack with emacs and then a repack the document with the perl script from: Unpacking and Packing OpenOffice.org files.

It worked! My brother was soon back in business.

Microsoft Office and corrupted files usually means “Don’t pass go”. OASIS is a great file format.

An insightful look at being a consultant: So you want to be a consultant…?

A Terse first look review by NewsForge about Base the OpenOffice.org database application. Note its worth also considering Kexi which seems like it is maturing rapidly.